It'd be a breakaway second division of the Scottish Premier League with possibly (though I'm not quite clear on this bit) no relegation or promotion up and down to the rest of the Scottish Football League.

The head of the SFA has threatened to create it to ensure Rangers are in the second tier if the Scottish football league vote goes against them. Which is basically a way of punishing any club that dares to enforce the standard agreed rules for administration and tears the integrity of Scottish football to shreds.

What I find more appallingly arrogant is the justification of it is that the SPL can cope without Rangers for a year. So it's basically Rangers WILL get promoted. Which they almost certainly will but still...

Now, Ibra's a great player, but Inter must have been laughing their arses off when Barca suggested that to them. Morratti must have held his breath and responded only in nods so as not to give the game away

Disappointed Robin's decided against signing a new deal, but it's not a massive surprise, that statement was a total dick move though. If he doesn't want to sign that's fair enough, it's his decision, but he's completely undermined the club, made it virtually impossible to hold him to his final year and significantly weakened our bargaining position when we do sell him.

He's obviously tried to dress it up as being open with the fans because he respects us so much, but it comes across as hugely calculated. Not gonna cry on about loyalty etc, this is football after all, but for a man who claims to love the club, Wenger and the fans so much, he's acted like a prick here.

prominent arsenal bloggers this morning, who should be above that kind of thing ideally. i mean i'm probably sticking up for him a bit too much, because i've been a massive fan of him as a player since he arrived. but i knew he was a gonner after watching that United defeat last season, where he stood staring at the ground for about 10 mins after the final whistle.

i saw a blogger there questioning his commitment, or the fact he picked up injuries put a shadow over his claims of commitment (as if he had any control over stuff like that), and even claiming it cost the club trophies. i know for a fact there was one season where he spent months out injured and yet still scored the goals/assists to get into the Champions League. this kind of mud-throwing is beyond pathetic really.

call me naive but i honestly think he's exasperated with the way the club's being run/managed. people go on about money handicaps, but you don't need billions to teach your players how to defend. the team are an embarrassment defensively. i imagine it's something that he brought up and you can imagine what the response was, considering how long we have seen the same problems and how obvious they are

I just looked up Guti and was surprised to see that he only played 14 times for Spain (compared to almost 400 appearances for Real). Imagine someone playing 400 times for united and not being an absolute shoe-in for the England team.

is Arsenal fans genuinely convinced that players don't go on to better themselves once they leave the club. As briefly discussed last night, i did a little trophy count of what high-profile Arsenal snubbers have won since leaving, and it's pushing half-a-century of top-level trophies (42 if you include stuff like Super Cups, etc - FORTY TWO!).

My intention here isn't really to rub it in that much, i know how disappointing it can be when your best player wants out, and no club's ever above that, no club, but the average Arsenal fan's grasp of reality is baffling. Some of these "there's only one way after leaving here" merchants even include players like Patrick Vieira in this list, forgetting he went on to be one of the most successful players in Serie A (7 trophies), or even, perhaps more bafflingly, Ashley Cole (8 trophies).

Every big-name player who has left Arsenal in recent years has justified themselves in doing so on footballing grounds.

Barca bloody love buying players they don't need and then doing their best to ruin their careers. See also: Carceres, Chygrynski, Zlatan, Mascherano, that Brazillian striker who was really rated Kerrison?

Because he's so good, it generally doesn't matter and he can go round doing whatever he wants, however, when they're really up against it I think he can look a bit lost in the team.

Take the Chelsea game at the Nou Camp, he seemed to spend most of the team sort of on the inside left in an advanced position, with Iniesta a bit wider of him. There was no need to play two guys in the same position.

if i was an Arsenal fan, i'd be more excited then upset about RVP wanting to move on. Giroud and Podolski could both prove canny signings, and providing (PROVIDING) Wenger adds a couple more players, including the midfielderthe fans have been calling for for almost a decade, and they get their injury-prone squad players back up and running, they could have the basis for quite an exciting side there (though we've be en saying this every summer).

In terms of where Van Persie might go, well, it's got boring already, hasn't it. I've said United! from day one, and i think it makes more sense for them to sell to them than City now. The United!/Arsenal rivalry's dead, completely done and dusted, so they might as well swallow their pride and let him go there. I think it'd be the best move for all involved - Arsenal don't look like a feeder club, their fans get *some* straws to cling to, United! get a player that could win them the title, we're not lumbered with a striker we really don't need, and the player gets to play every week at a club who'll almost always pick up one pot a season.

He hasn't only had one good season, but he has only had one full season, which is an important point. Arsenal stuck by him through a lot. Arguably if he wasn't such a crock we might have won something in all those years he is complaining about.

2007/8 was some of the best football we've played, and once Eduardo got snapped perhaps a fully fit RVP could have dragged over the line.

but I think you'd have to be insane to be an Arsenal fan and excited that Van Persie is leaving. I'll win the lottery PROVIDING I buy the winning ticket or get to sleep with about 12 Playboy models PROVIDING I just happen to wake up as Hugh Hefner tomorrow.

It doesn't have to be the end of the world (indeed, it probably won't have too much of a tangible effect if Van Persie leaves. Arsenal will go from fighting for CL qualification to fighting for CL qualification), but there's no way to spin your club's captain, top scorer and standout player deciding to leave and publicly implying that a lack of ambition is his reason as a good thing.

Would be to say... Right. Call us up and offer us £25 million cash and he's yours, we'll accept straight away. Any less than that and he's staying the whole season and you can fuck off, we aren't going to listen.

There are enough clubs with enough money to pay that for him despite him only having a year left on his contract. If they aren't interested in him at that price, then fine. We get Van Persie for potentially the best season of his career and they miss out on that.

I would have been in favour of us keeping him for the last year, but his statement has effectively (and pretty deliberately imo) made that impossible.

We shouldn't rush to take the first bid that comes in, but all we can really do now is try to get the best possible price and get rid in time to reinvest the cash. There's more important stuff, like strengthening the squad and Song and Walcott's contracts to worry about now.

I'd guess that one of Arsenal's conditions for letting him go (and I agree with benni in that this public statement is a clear attempt to engineer an immediate move) now would be that he claims no contractual bonuses, like a loyalty bonus. He's unlikely to simply forego that money- the buying club will simply have to pay it, either directly or via the transfer fee.

My guess is that such machinations are why we've seen the likes of Nasri and Young move for such big money with little of their contract left. I'd happily wager that a good £4-5m of Nasri's alleged £25m transfer fee went straight to player and agent.

Which is a huge part of why this is such a dick move. By making his discontent public, he drives down his value and makes it more likely that a club will have the funds to cough up whatever he'll miss out on by way of Arsenal bonuses.

The more I think about it, the more dastardly selfish (if still understandable) his statement is.

he's 28 with one year left on his current (and final) deal. Someone might creep it up towards £20m if there's a bidding war, more realistically you'd expect under 15+a first dibs on some of their kids.

can't believe i've defended van persie's character on here before. I feel JILTED. Such a fucking cunty thing to do. Pretty sure he'll have lost all respect from arsenal fans now.

What does not matching his ambition mean anyway? That we're not prepared to get into loads of unsustainable debt because we don't have a rich owner? GREAT, THAT'S GREAT. NICE.

Yeah as people have said it just looks exacltly like a statement designed to get him out of arsenal asap. Fine, he's not obliged to stay here, but he doesn't have to essentially call the entire club small time. It's just...... eurgh.

this is quite a surprise, especially when you consider we still definitely need to bring in a top level battling midfielder and a both sided fullback. Do we have this much money?

Szczesny isn't the best goalkeeper in the world, but he certainly has potential to be up there. I can't think of any games we lost or didn't win last season because of a clear mistake by him. Someone with his level of ambition / personality isn't going to be happy about sitting on the bench after a season of being first choice either, so we'll probably have to sell him at a knockdown price. Fabianski has been itching to leave for a while too. Who will be backup?

That said, this would obviously be a very good purchase if we have the money available for the other essential purchases. Also a pretty strong rebuff to Van Persie's assertion we are lacking ambition.

Teaching kids how to control the ball and pass properly in an environment that doesn't mean big physical lumps prosper while late bloomers get left behind.
Is this how the English Messi, Cesc or Modric comes about?

Playing in an estate team until about 14 you just used to kick the decent players all over the 1ft thick mud for 80 minutes. Until the poor diet and alcohol took effect and you couldnt even catch the twats anymore. So fucking boring practicing technique though blurgh

is going to swap his assistant's role at wednesday for the reserve-team coach role at arsenal.

he'll be missed as he's a very well thought of coach - it might, however, mean we get a few of arsenal's up-and-comers on loan. i'd be happy with that, so long as they're better than sanchez fucking watt. what a disappointment he was.

"I knew what the market was and I wasn't prepared to pay anything over what I had known was agreed before. Liverpool would have provided Gylfi with a wonderful opportunity to perform with a manager that he knows and at a club which is a real footballing institution. But he's decided to go to Tottenham, for whatever reason." Liverpool's last 3 league finishes: 7th, 6th, 8th. Our last 3 league finishes: 4th, 5th, 4th. It's not hard to see why he'd pick us over you. As I said yesterday, I wouldn't be surprised if we'd actually offered him a *lower* wage.